About

Here are some words that have been written.

Bits and pieces.

It is a self-regarding activity, writing – of that, there can be no doubt – and the activity of looking in the mirror does not obviously recommend itself as a spectator sport: spectating spectating. To make up for this deficiency, in the stadium for one, the solitary self-absorbed spectator begins to talk to themselves.

The writer begins to talk to themselves and nobody because there is no one else present. There is the idea of an audience but, at the moment of writing, they have not yet arrived. They may never arrive. Even the playwright soliloquizes to an empty auditorium.

The writer will have seen something of some sort of world. However, when they write, they rediscover what they have seen inside themselves. [If there is a writer who can look at the world and write at the same time, he must be a strange sort of a creature – writing is not sketching.] So, still looking inward, the writer begins to talk into an empty room.

If others should come along and take notice of the solidified echos of those ramblings, will they stop and consider them? The writer hopes, perhaps believes, that their words will find lovers or, at least, dear friends: eyes that delight in their form, hearts that sadden at parting from what they say.

Writing is a species of comical lunacy.

Even the process is ridiculous:

1. sucking the end of the pen whilst staring out, deep into the blue beyond

[This staring into empty space is where true emptiness is to be found, absolute nothingness (abhorred as a concept) when there is the absence, however temporary, of inspiration; when imagination can’t even remember its own name];

2. to becoming consumed in the monomania of setting words down

[In this part of the process, only that which was formerly missing, inspiration and imagination, remain and the whole of the rest of time and space is lost to awareness, only the interior virtual space exists];

3. through to the alternate moods of elation and despondency when reading the result

[Now the world rushes back in replete with an imagination that cheers with approval and howls with cries of derision, sometimes despair, rarely is there heard a contented voice]

– not to mention that whole enveloping way of looking at the world which surrounds this process, infusing the world with tender, devoted, writerly feeling.

Therefore, are these written words speaking to the ghosts of ante-readers yet to arrive or are they merely part of the reflexive circle of oneself speaking to oneself?

Oh, well, reader, if you are going to be, please help yourself to these bits and pieces…otherwise, of course, they’re just for me.